Reenacting the Housing Crisis

The financial crisis of 2008 — from which the country has still not recovered — was caused largely by the government forcing banks to make Affirmative Action mortgage loans to people unlikely to repay them in order to redistribute wealth. Has the government learned anything from this debacle? Of course it has. By vastly expanding government dependency through increased unemployment, helping get Obama elected and then reelected, and providing fodder for anti-capitalist diatribes by the socialists running the “mainstream” media, the collapse worked out so well for statists that they are applying the same tactic to Hispanics imported from the Third World to displace the American population.

A Texas bank has reached a settlement to pay back thousands of Latino customers after allegations of discrimination practices based on race.

The Justice Department made the announcement on Tuesday that the Texas Champion Bank of Alice, Texas will pay $700,000 to close to 2,000 Latino customers for loan disparities based on the national origin.

Jesse Jackson–style shakedowns are now in the purview of the federal government.

“The complaint filed today demonstrates that the Civil Rights Division is committed to fair lending enforcement across the entire spectrum of credit markets,” Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a press release following the announcement.

Readers will recall that Perez is a hardcore left-wing ideologue, who has put banks into a catch-22 position where they will be punished for “discrimination” both for not making loans to minorities unlikely to pay them back (“redlining”) and for making loans to minorities unlikely to pay them back (“reverse redlining”). When Marxists write the rules, capitalists are not allowed to win.

As part of the punishment, Texas Champion will be forced to provide “equal opportunity training to its employees” — i.e., P.C. brainwashing, probably along the lines of what USDA bureaucrats go through.

Just last week the Obama administration formalized the implementation of the Fair Housing Act’s “Discriminatory Effects Standard” which hold banks accountable for their actions in the foreclosure crisis that hit Latinos especially hard.

The new standard prohibits any practices that result in discrimination “regardless of whether there was intent to discriminate.”

Unskilled, non–English-speaking Third World immigrants are less likely to repay mortgages than regular Americans, especially if banks have been forced to give them loans on racial grounds. Consequently, they are more likely to face disclosure. Voilà: a “discriminatory effect.” The solution is of course more coercion and economic sabotage by our racist and collectivist rulers.